Capability

Microsoft Phone Home!

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The actually somewhat inevitable happened: Microsoft buying Nokia’s phone business.  Here’s how things may go down, and there’s skepticism that Elop is going to be the next big leader.  Elop has his strong points, but don’t expect him to become CEO.

Does any of this surprise anyone?  I’m surprised it took this long.

I see this as having to have some effect on Microsoft’s plans (probably can’t do any worse), but am not sure what it’ll mean employment-wise.  Microsoft was doing some hiring lately, so I don’t know if they’ll shed – or add – people.

Also? Nokia’s stock did well.

– Steven Savage

Workable Drops Free, CEO Nikos Moraitakis Discusses it At Medium

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Workable apparently dropped their free membership, and their CEO Nikos Moraitakis explains why at Medium in a must-read essay.

Two things stood out for me:

Limiting design choices to things that can scale infinitely at near-zero cost is a recipe for making mediocre products.

He’s got a point.  When free is baked into your model you are automatically facing a series of constraints.  You can see this in most any model, but when your constraint is “limit what we charge” for that is one freakin’ huge constraint.

When someone tweets “this product sucks” readers can’t tell if this is coming from someone who got the good version of the product or the bad, unsupported one. Oh, and for every paid user you probably have 10 or 100 free ones. They will be louder, by sheer numbers alone.

He’s right.  Trust me.  Been there.  Also he notes people who get “free” are oddly hard to please.

Worth reading.  Think I need to interview this guy.

– Steven Savage